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Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #2 - Capacities

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Hello and welcome back to another Victoria 3 dev diary! Today we will be talking about three of the four of the main ‘currencies’ of the game - namely Capacities (the last being Money, which we’ll of course come back to later).

We mentioned in the very first dev diary that there is no ‘mana’ in Victoria 3, and since this dev diary is about the game’s “currencies”, I want to be clear on what I mean by that. When we say there is “no mana” we mean that the resources in Victoria 3 arise and are spent in clearly defined ways that are parts of the simulation, not from an overly abstract concept or vague idea. There is, of course, some degree of abstraction involved (all games are abstractions after all), but we want all the game’s currencies to be strongly rooted in the mechanics and not feel arbitrary.

But enough about that and onto Capacities. What exactly are they?

Well, for starters, calling them currencies is actually not accurate. Capacities are not a pooled resource and are not accumulated or spent, but instead, have a constant generation and a constant usage (similar to for example Administrative Capacity in Stellaris), and you generally want to keep your usage from exceeding your generation. Each capacity represents one specific area of your nation’s ability to govern and is used solely for matters relating to that area.

As mentioned, Capacities are not accumulated, so excess generation is not pooled, but instead there is an effect for each Capacity which is positive if generation exceeds usage and quite negative if usage exceeds generation - a country that incorporates territories left and right without expanding its bureaucratic corps may quickly find itself mired in debt as tax collection collapses under the strain!

Bureaucracy represents a nation’s ability to govern, invest in and collect taxes from its incorporated territory. It is produced by the Government Administration building, where many of a nation’s Bureaucrats will be employed. All of a nation’s Incorporated States use a base amount of Bureaucracy which increases with the size of their population, and further increased by each Institution (such as Education or Police - more on those later!) that a country has invested in. Overall, the purpose of Bureaucracy is to ensure that there is a cost to ruling over, taxing and providing for your population - administrating China should not be cheap!

The Swedish Bureaucracy is currently a bit overworked and the country could certainly benefit from another Government Administration building or two.
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Authority represents the Head of State’s personal power and ability to enact change in the country through decree. It is generated from your Laws - generally, the more repressive and authoritarian the country, the more Authority it will generate - and is used by a variety of actions such as enacting decrees in specific states, interacting with Interest Groups and promoting or banning certain types of Goods. Overall, the purpose of Authority is to create an interesting trade-off between more and less authoritarian societies - by shifting the distribution of power away from the Pops into the hands of the ruler, your ability to rule by decree is increased, and vice versa.

The Swedish King has more Authority at his disposal than he is currently using, slightly speeding up the rate at which laws can be passed.
authority.PNG

Influence represents a country’s ability to conduct diplomacy and its reach on the global stage. It is generated primarily from your Rank (Great Powers have more Influence than Major Powers and so on) and is used to support ongoing diplomatic actions and pacts, such as Improving Relations, Alliances, Trade Deals, Subjects and so on. Overall, the purpose of Influence is to force players to make interesting choices about which foreign countries they want to build strong diplomatic relationships with.

Sweden has plenty of unused Influence and could certainly afford to support another diplomatic pact or two!
influence.png

That’s all for today! Join us again next week as I cover something yet another topic that’s fundamental to Victoria 3: Buildings. See you then!
 
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Make Victoria 3 said:
i hope this comes mostly from social reforms though? If someone was forced to choose between living in a rich country that is an absolute monarchy/dictatorship (that does not persecute that person) and a poor country that is a perfect democracy. Pretty sure most would pick the rich country.
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Voting rights don't directly increase the wealth of pops, but they do give them the ability to push for social reforms that benefit them, which in turn may mean the player is able to get those reforms passed.
 
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Hiiri said:
It's this overly abstact nonsense again. How does right of assembly help with road maintenance as is seen in the authority mana screenshot?




As a customer it's enough to say "I don't like X Y and Z" It's not our job to design the game for them, they have the talent and we literally give them our money to do it for us.
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I am not pretending to teach them anything or impose what I think it is right...that's simply what I think. Probably I am wrong, it is fine.
Who the heck drops a sarcastic laugh on this? I hope it made you happy, you little bully.
 
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Fabiondo said:
In victoria II you could play the entire game without building a single factory; and that is usually how I played; just influencing things indirectly.
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I love playing games by not playing them at all.

Also, did you use national focuses? How is that not even more abstract than ordering a building to be built?
 
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Wizzington said:
We're going to delve more into buildings next week, but you can think of building a Government Administration as essentially creating the offices, logistics etc for your bureaucrats - without it they can't do their jobs, but you still need qualified, literate pops to take those jobs and without them it's just an empty complex doing nothing. All buildings work like this in Victoria 3, including ports and railroads (which did not need pops to function in V2). You even need to employ pops to construct things for you in V3.
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"You even need to employ pops to construct things for you in V3."
tropico lol.

Does this mean construction offices are buildings now?
 
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I like it. This is not mana because these are not abstract resources that you can accumulate and spend. These are perhaps best described as indicators. They show the capacity of your country's birocracy, governmenr authority and international influence and you cant do anything with them.

Interesting game loops can emerge from this. For example birocracy deficit shows you have too few birocrats to effectively manage the country, but for those you e.g. need more educated people, but for that you need to build schools, but schools will at first increase birocracy deficit even further potentially ruining your budget (as birocracy deficit lowers your ability to collect taxes) and only then can you expect to slowly get educated workers to work as birocrats and effectively produce a surpluss of birocracy. Very interesting.

So yeah, this is not mana, these are indicators of underlying game mechanics.
 
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How intertwined are military and bureacracy?

There are plenty cases when in some things there was also a military effort and a dispatch of troops to help the bureacracy rather than just using bureacrats; say, management of some colonies, occupied lands or such. On Caucasus in Russian Empire that was the case. And in Ottoman Empire using army or Janissaries for some political/bureaucratic things wasn't unseen, as well as for bunch of military dictatorships.

Is there any interaction of this kind for it in the bureaucratic dependency?
 
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Will all the African countries have a Great lack of Bureaucracy,
or will it be case by case (for example emir abdelkader managed to centralize his territories and collect taxes all arround it) ??
 
It's not clear just from this screenshot, but Freedom of Assembly is a law in the Free Speech category of Laws, which "culminates" in Protected Speech. As the most liberal Law in this category, it grants no Authority, while more repressive Laws (like Freedom of Assembly) do. In isolation from the rest of the game, of course that means it looks like granting your people rights increases your Authority but that is actually the opposite of what is happening.

Also, this is of course not the only thing Free Speech Laws govern, there are other effects of the Laws as well which provide trade-offs to your country, but this is the only effect it has on Authority.

The reason why Road Maintenance uses Authority is because it's a decree (one of many different types) issued in a state to its population, and doesn't cost the government anything other than the Authority to ensure its people are following its directives. This is a pretty early-game solution to maintaining a good market connections in a few states at a time, more effective means of leveraging your economy to ensure cohesion between your states tend to emerge later in the game, freeing your Authority up for other things like suppressing your political opponents (or, you know, granting your people more rights, if that's how you want to go about it.)
 
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Tirenedon said:
I am a bit confused by Bureaucracy since in Victoria 2 it was based on how many bureaucrat pops you had to govern your states and how much funding you gave them. But here its based on a building you have in your capital city?
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Or spread out all over the empire. And each building would act like a job opening for bureaucrats i presume (good job, better retrain for the job?), like building armies act as a demand for guns. I wonder by building garrisons? And thus acting as a kind of demand. Firing armies would be fairly litteral, lighting up the barracks?
 
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I don't really know what to feel about the ruler bonuses (and possible maluses) being added to these resource/capacity pools. While I understand that the developers want to add characters to the game I feel like it comes over as odd that a constitutional monarch or a prime minister has so much impact on your actual administration/diplomatic incomes. Sure, some countries definitely had large figures once in a while that made a gigantic impact, but that doesn't take away the fact that for most of the 19th century Europe was governed by politicians that came and went and all didn't really have an actual impact on how the country functioned in general. I honestly can't think of any major figure in Dutch political history other than Thorbecke actually changing the constitution, and even then Thorbecke being there shouldn't magically raise administrative capacity. Also, how is Switzerland going to be represented in this game? Considering they have a directorial government.


About the Influence screenshot in particular:

Say, the current king with the Ambitious trait dies and the next monarch doesn't have that trait it's seemingly possible to have your entire diplomatic corps collapse, which is incredibly unrealistic for any European state after the Napoleonic Wars (and arguably for centuries before that as well). I'd rather have those resources be affected purely by the government/country in general instead of politicians and monarchs that come and go.
 
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Wizzington said:
Voting rights don't directly increase the wealth of pops, but they do give them the ability to push for social reforms that benefit them, which in turn may mean the player is able to get those reforms passed.
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Good, though does this mean even in absolute monarchies a player cant just enact reforms on a whim (granted one Zar got assassinated for abolishing serfdom as far as i know, but still...)?
 
lachek said:
The reason why Road Maintenance uses Authority is because it's a decree (one of many different types) issued in a state to its population, and doesn't cost the government anything other than the Authority to ensure its people are following its directives. This is a pretty early-game solution to maintaining a good market connections in a few states at a time, more effective means of leveraging your economy to ensure cohesion between your states tend to emerge later in the game, freeing your Authority up for other things like suppressing your political opponents (or, you know, granting your people more rights, if that's how you want to go about it.)
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OK, so it is: "yo, peasants, fix the road or else". I dig that. Thanks.
 
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lachek said:
It's not clear just from this screenshot, but Freedom of Assembly is a law in the Free Speech category of Laws, which "culminates" in Protected Speech. As the most liberal Law in this category, it grants no Authority, while more repressive Laws do. Also, this is of course not the only thing Free Speech Laws govern, there are other effects of the Laws as well which provides trade-offs to your country, but this is the only effect it has on Authority.

The reason why Road Maintenance uses Authority is because it's a decree (one of many different types) issued in a state to its population, and doesn't cost the government anything other than the Authority to ensure its people are following its directives. This is a pretty early-game solution to maintaining a good market connections in a few states at a time, more effective means of leveraging your economy to ensure cohesion between your states tend to emerge later in the game, freeing your Authority up for other things like suppressing your political opponents (or, you know, granting your people more rights, if that's how you want to go about it.)
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I'd recommend making a separate post about this topic! People are already assuming authority is tied only to roads, and they might miss this comment.
 
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After thinking about it some more, what could help is maybe a change in presentation. Having scaling factors on the capacity modifier, so the tooltip rarely shows a round 100th number.
If for example filled bureocratic building doesn't give 50 capacity per level in the tooltip, but instead it shows how many bureocrats are currently employed in those buildings and the final numbers isn't a flat value but more like +146.31 employed bureaucrats in goverment buildings, with tech or law modifier beeing able to push it to +167.22 or something.

Psychologically this could change something for the player, while keeping the same game mechanic.
 
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Mr. Wiggles said:
Sorry I dont like this, feels like mana with extra steps
:(
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Isnt money mana with extra steps there is no reason a building have to cost that specfic amount of money or why that railroad does in EU4 money is just a type of mana that you can do things to get more of if you think about it isnt Manpower just mana as well you dont know how many people live in an area in most games isnt it just an abstraction?
 
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